Category: Interior Life

future heaven

Our Destiny Motivates Us To Holiness

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Most of us have areas in our lives we have not achieved holiness. It helps to remind ourselves of how God motivates us to holiness. One way is reminding us of our destiny. Since we are destined to live as perfected new Adams in an eternal community of love with God and his followers, why would we embrace anything that doesn’t fit with our future identity? Why would we resist the restoration of God’s image in us? We long for our full Christformation so we pursue Christlike purity now. In other words, God has predestined us to holiness: “He chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him” (Eph. 1:4, ESV). Christ died “in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him, if indeed you continue in the faith” (Col. 1:22-23, ESV). One of the major Continue Reading →

humility

The Peril of Being Unbroken

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It has been observed that for most Christians they must reach a place in their life where their self-dependence is broken so that they abandon their attachment to pride and allow themselves to abide in humility before God. It might be through an external crisis or an internal crisis but we all must go through the process of experiencing the death of the illusion that we are living our Christian life well or that we are truly dependent on God. In other words, we must get to the end of ourselves. This lack of brokenness, or lack of pliability, manifests itself in many destructive ways in our relationships, some of the most obvious are drivenness, stubbornness, defensiveness, lack of empathy, lack of honest self-awareness, unwillingness to accept help, unwillingness to have vulnerabilities and lack of teachability. Even if we have been a believer for twenty years and are honored in Continue Reading →

mask

Unmask Your False Self

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Humans have a habit of creating a false self. We love to pretend that we don’t have the faults, weaknesses, and pain that we really have. In order to get others to value us we construct a false self that we think they will like. A false self can also stem from pride or the desire to control. Thus, even if you are overcoming shame and self-rejection you can still give in to the temptation of hosting a false self. A very common false self for those who have been believers for some time is a false self that appears more Christlike than they really are, usually created by them in order to gain honor from other Christians. This is a religious false self, and it can grow very secretly. We are naturally inclined to present ourselves as more whole than we really are, so we need to consciously resist Continue Reading →

obey God's will

5 Movements Toward Pursuing God’s Will

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Last week we looked at committing ourselves to God’s will. Now consider an area of your life in which you wonder if you are doing God’s will. We will go through five steps for examining our hearts and choosing God’s will. This is not so much an exercise in finding God’s will as it is an exercise in guiding our hearts to abiding in God. Five Steps Toward Pursuing in God’s Will We remind ourselves to consider God’s will. We examine ourselves to determine if we are really open to pursuing God’s will. We try to discern God’s will. We ask ourselves if we are now willing to do God’s will. We do God’s will. The first movement is to get in the habit of reminding ourselves to consider God’s will for the decisions we make or attitudes we embrace. This is simply looking to him for his will. Common Continue Reading →

obey

Are You Committed To God’s Will?

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When someone mentions that we should do God’s will it can conjure up images of gritting our teeth and forcing ourselves to do something very disagreeable. There is some truth in this but the supreme reason we do God’s will is that we love him and know that his principles for living will produce more life and happiness than anything else. Learning to do God’s will when we don’t feel like it and when we don’t feel God is one of the greatest and most freeing lessons in the Christian life. Remember that the purpose of all of God’s commands is that we would have more life, bear fruit, abide in the kingdom of God and keep us moving in the direction of the future perfect community of love with God and his followers. The directives in Scripture are ideals that we move toward as we are gradually “attaining to Continue Reading →